https://raheem.ai/ is an interesting project. One idea someone in one of their community calls had was scraping dispatch data to figure out where social services might be useful, and they're creating a dispatch app which lets people ask for non-police help.
To best mimic the success of the original post, it would be good to be able to identify people doing the most damage to a neighborhood so we could help them first with tax relief, food, birth control, whatever would help the most.
Yes, but the fact that we have to monitor them proves they aren't up to the job. The people need to do this, and we should use scraping data to prevent _ALL_ crimes.
Not understanding or having experience with something is not the same as it lacking validity and merit.
Without understanding the problems and ways police harm communities, throwing data at a problem is unlikely to result in good outcomes. Through the lens of “crime” harm is hard to separate from illegality. Driving with expired plates because you can’t afford it until next month is illegal, but it isn't causing the same amount of harm as burying that person under court fees and fines until they’re homeless. Unless you collect the right data, understand the data's meaning, data is useless.
Some starting places on harm police do to communities, if you’re interested:
I’m not against stopping crime, but most proposed solutions to crime usually boil down to “more cops”. Even data-driven ideas like you’re suggesting seem to end up as convoluted ways of saying “send more cops here instead of there”. Crimes of poverty can’t be solved with policing, and any attempt to reduce crime without first acknowledging that is very likely to do more harm than good.
It would be interesting to do this too. Although this is going to be a yak shave (a good one) - changing the upstream things that cause people to turn to crime.
